Free Mandrake by Susan Cooper

difficult to believe that in England they could have been built so quickly. As he watched, one of the helicopters whirring overhead on the river route turned suddenly over the south bank and rose to land on the roof of one of the tallest blocks.
    But he did not really feel the change until he came to the other side of the bridge; and then London hit him with the vicious force of a hard, tight fist. He told himself afterwards that it was the unaccustomed noise: the traffic and the rushing crowds; that what he took for hostility was only the contrast of a busy city with his long lone seclusion. But no reason that he invented could explain the peculiar disquiet that flooded over him: the sense of being small and buffeted like a child plunged into an uninterested adult world. Unmistakably, he felt unwanted.
    He imagined strange sideways glances on the faces of people he passed. He wondered if he bore some kind of distinguishing mark. ‘I am not a Londoner.’ For the first time in his life he thought: I have been away from cities too long.
    He caught the monorail to Holborn, and walked to the offices of the University Press in Southampton Row. They were closed. No sign or message hung outside the locked doors; the place was dead, and silent. Only the streets were alive. People walked hurriedly: he had forgotten London’s continual hurry. He stood unobtrusively in the porch at the top of the steps, beside the locked door, and looked down at the passing faces. They all seemed to wear an abstracted, listening expression, as if dazed by some mild drug.
    No one paused, except to buy an evening paper from an old woman on the corner; there was no motionless figure on the horizon, except the old woman—and one man, on the other side of the street, gazing earnestly into the window of another publishing house whose name Queston remembered dimly for its textbooks.
    With the aimless attentiveness of those who wait, Queston stood watching the man’s back: a dark head with two curious round bald spots at its centre; a raincoat hanging loose from the shoulders; trousers whose ends drooped too low over the backs of the shoes. What was the man gazing at so intently? He looked the kind more likely to be standing furtively over a bookstall in the Tottenham Court Road, not examining dull and highly respectable educational works. A down-at-heel academic, perhaps, taking a breather from the British Museum Reading Room.
    When the man had stood immobile for ten full minutes, Queston’s curiosity became intolerable; it was as if he were taking refuge in it from the bewilderment of the new London. He had to see what was in that window. Rather than cross the street directly towards the man, he came down the silent steps of the University Press and walked a few yards up on his own side of the road; then turned to cross. But as he turned, he saw that the man had disappeared. Apparently the spell had broken. He walked on towards the intriguing window; looked in, and then stopped short. Three books were displayed there, propped upright, facing forward, with only their covers visible. One was titled Higher Calculus, another Geometry for Schools, Volume One and the third Geometry for Schools, Volume Two. There was nothing else in the window at all, and even these were not easy to see. The glass was so grimy that Queston had to peer hard at them through an obstinate reflection of the street, and of his own face. How could those three lure a man to ten minutes’ fascinated study? He chuckled at the anti-climax, and turned away. London had always been full of amiable crackpots.
    Opposite him, the University Press was as dead as before. Somewhere a clock struck, and he looked at his watch: half past two. He was hungry, and the thick wad of manuscript clutched beneath his arm seemed heavier than before. No point in waiting any longer. He had promised himself a large and expensive lunch in Soho, but now it was too late. And in any case he knew, watching the grim